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Own goal hands Plateau United 1-0 victory against Kwara United

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An own goal by Lawal Muritala handed Plateau United Football Club of Jos a 1-0 victory against visiting Kwara United on Sunday in 2022/2023 Nigeria Professional Football League, NPFL.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that there was nothing separating the two sides until the 30th minute of the Group B Match Day 6 fixtures.

That was when the Ilorin side’s defender turned the ball into his own net.

Plateau United’s Technical Adviser, Fidelis Ilechukwu, during his post-match interview, acknowledged that his side was not at its best.

But he blamed injuries for the performance.

“None of the two teams played well anyway. They didn’t create clear-cut goal-scoring chances. But the most important thing is that we won.

“We will go back to the drawing board and work on our team.

“We have the challenge of injuries but the players are coming back gradually,” Ilechukwu said.

On his part, Kwara United’s Technical Adviser, Abdullazeez Mohammed, said they had themselves to blame for the defeat.

Mohammed said the Ilorin-based club side wanted to build on the momentum gained from their last match but failed to do so in a sad circumstance.

“In our last match, we scored two goals. Today we played better than the host but we could not score.

“We will continue to build from there. The team is getting momentum but the last touch is still in the works. We got it right last week, but we didn’t get it today,” he said.

The coach however refused to talk about the match’s officiating, saying it was “needless when players, coaches, and the crowd make mistakes.

“I don’t think the officiating today was bad.”

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New leaders, new fund: Sequoia has raised $7B to expand its AI bets

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Few venture firms have bet more aggressively on AI than Sequoia Capital, and it isn’t slowing down.

The Silicon Valley stalwart has raised roughly $7 billion for a new fund, according to Bloomberg. Sequoia declined TechCrunch’s request for comment. The money will go toward what the firm calls its “expansion strategy” — essentially its late-stage investing arm, focused on the U.S. and Europe — and it’s nearly double Sequoia’s last comparable fund, a $3.4 billion vehicle raised in 2022.

That growth in fund size reflects something bigger: late-stage investing has taken on an entirely new meaning in the AI era. Companies can now scale at a speed and cost that would have been unimaginable a decade ago, and the firms backing them have to keep pace.

The money signals where Sequoia sees the future: deeply embedded in AI, from the giants building the underlying technology to the startups putting it to work. The firm has backed two of the most prominent players in the AI race — OpenAI originally and, more recently, Anthropic — both of which are reportedly eyeing public listings in 2026. The development that could mean a significant payday for the firm.

Sequoia isn’t only swinging for the foundational AI heavyweights, however. It has also placed bets on other buzzy startups, including Physical Intelligence, the Bay Area robotics startup, and Factory, which builds AI agents for enterprise engineering teams.

The fundraise is also the first major capital raise under Sequoia’s new leadership, with Alfred Lin and Pat Grady now serving as co-stewards of the 54-year-old firm.

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Factory hits $1.5B valuation to build AI coding for enterprises

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More than three years after the emergence of generative AI, AI-assisted coding remains by far the most popular and lucrative use case for the technology.

Although multiple companies — including Anthropic, maker of Claude Code, as well as Cursor and Cognition — are already vying for dominance, investors believe there is room for at least one more player.

On Wednesday, Factory, a startup developing AI agents for enterprise engineering teams, announced it had raised $150 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, and Blackstone. Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, joined the startup’s board.

Factory founder Matan Grinberg told the Wall Street Journal that the company’s key differentiator is its ability to switch between different foundation models, such as Anthropic’s Claude or Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. However, startups like Cursor also don’t rely on a single model to generate code.

Factory’s customers include engineering teams at Morgan Stanley, Ernst & Young, and Palo Alto Networks.

The startup was founded in 2023 after Grinberg, then a PhD student at UC Berkeley, cold-emailed Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire. The two bonded over mutual academic interest. (Maguire’s PhD from Caltech is in the same area of physics Grinberg was studying.)

Maguire convinced Grinberg to drop out and launch Factory, with Sequoia backing the startup at the seed stage.

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